Fairfax County Police Watch: The cop crime wave in America continues NO, Settlements Over Police Brutality DON’T Bring Accountability to Cops or Prevent Future Police Brutality

Ed Krayewski

Reason.Com

shocking story of police abuse from New Jersey, via NJ.com:

In the suit filed in Superior Court in Newton, Raul Sanchez had said he was on his property in Wantage in the early morning hours of Nov. 21, 2009 when he saw "four people with flashlights heading toward him."

The troopers threw him on the ground, handcuffed him and asked, "Where's the gun?" according to the suit. Sanchez said he told the troopers he had no gun.

Nonetheless, the troopers kicked him on his back and sides and beat him with their flashlights, he said. They continued to beat him after he was handcuffed on the ground and not resisting arrest, according to the suit.

Sanchez suffered three broken ribs and a bruised spleen as a result of the attack, according to his attorney, Jeffrey Patti.

"Luckily, there was no permanent damage to the spleen and the broken ribs have healed," Patti said, noting that Sanchez, now 61, was 56 at the time of the attack.

No criminal charges were ever filed against Sanchez as a result of the incident, Patti said.

He added that to the best of his knowledge, the troopers have all kept their jobs and none have been disciplined.

Even being accused of owning a gun in New Jersey can be dangerous to your health. Sanchez’s lawyer claims police targeted Sanchez because he complained about patrons of the next door bar throwing garbage on his property.

The settlement, negotiated by a deputy attorney general on behalf of the four troopers, protects the state from having to admit any wrong-doing in the incident by offering money in exchange for Sanchez dropping the lawsuit. So taxpayers are paying not just for the settlement but for the thug cops’ representation. The State Police won’t comment, so it’s impossible to find out if they even pretended to run an investigation into the serious allegations of corruption made in the lawsuit.

I’m not going to deny anyone their right to extract as much money from the government as they can when they’ve been brutalized by government employees but the process of obtaining a settlement over claims of police brutality does NOTHING to bring accountability to police. Yet that claim is often floated. Sanchez’s attorney says he hoped that by “holding those four troopers accountable, future victims of police brutality can be spared.”

Similarly, a police brutality case settled in Philadelphia had one columnist suggesting the settlement, which also led to no discipline of the officers involved in the brutality or the cover-up, meant “not every cop who behaves badly gets a pass.” Much later in the piece the columnist admitted that “considering that taxpayers are the ones indirectly footing the bill and, as far as I know - police declined to comment - the officers aren't facing any disciplinary action, I'm not sure it's a lesson learned.” She finished by calling on Philadelphia police chief Charles Ramsey to investigate the cops’ behavior. And he should. But as Ramsey himself has stressed before, his options for disciplining and even terminating cops are severely limited by the police contract, something not mentioned by that columnist nor many of the others who touch on the issue of police brutality at all.

Morrogh finds cop he doesn’t love. In other news, hell freezes.

Probe of fatal police shooting goes to federal authorities

By Justin Jouvenal/Post

The Fairfax County prosecutor has turned over the investigation of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed Springfield man to federal authorities, citing complications with the five-month-old case.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Morrogh said the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has agreed to continue the probe into the death of 46-year-old John Geer, who was shot during a standoff with Fairfax County police in August. No one has been charged in the incident.

“There is a conflict of interest that has arisen in the case,” Morrogh said Thursday. “And there is a second potential conflict of interest that has arisen out of my office. . . . This is the prudent thing to do.”

Morrogh declined to describe the nature of the conflicts because the investigation is ongoing. The U.S. attorney’s office said Thursday that it could not confirm or deny any investigation or comment on pending investigations.

Police went to Geer’s Pebble Brook Court home on Aug. 29 because of a report of a domestic disturbance. Geer’s father, Don Geer, said his son was upset because his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, had decided to leave him.

John Geer had thrown his girlfriend’s belongings in the front yard. She called police and told them that Geer had a firearm. Police said they tried for about 50 minutes to persuade Geer to leave the home, but he refused.

Don Geer said he watched the climax of the encounter. He said that he could not hear what officers were saying to his son but that he saw him standing with empty hands resting on top of a screen door at the home’s entrance.

At some point, John Geer began to slowly lower his hands and an officer opened fire, hitting Geer in the chest, his father said. Geer retreated inside and closed the door. A SWAT team eventually entered the home and found Geer dead.

Don Geer said detectives later told him that his son did not have a gun on him at the time of the shooting but that there was a holstered handgun a couple of steps from the front door.

Don Geer said it appeared to him that the shooting was unjustified, but he was unsure what to make of the probe being turned over to federal authorities.

“I don’t know whether that’s good or bad — if I had a better idea of why they are doing it, I could form an opinion,” he said.

Geer and friends of his son have been critical of how long the investigation has taken, but Morrogh said police and prosecutors were working to explore all the evidence. He did not think federal prosecutors would have to start from scratch.

“No one wants these things to linger on,” Morrogh said.

Our ink will outlast his career

Under the reign of former Chief of Police Rhorer the Fairfax County Police arrested a man for not wearing clothes in his house while he made coffee, set up an eye doctor on a gambling charge and then used the SWAT team to kill him. An investigation into the charge that the Doctor’s primary clients were cops has never been investigated. The police gunned down an emotionally unstable man because cop who shot him wrongly assumed the man was trying to escape. He wasn’t. The cops also shot dead four other citizens under highly questionable circumstances. The department under Rhorer was sued multiple times by citizens. So did they fire Rhorer? Naw they promoted him. According to news reports Rhorer draws a salary of $191,168 per year as Deputy Fairfax County Executive as well as a concurrent pension from the Fairfax County police of $173000 per year.

Occupation by force

According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, nearly one in five Fairfax residents (17.5 percent) is of Asian descent while Hispanics make up nearly 16 percent of Fairfax’s overall population. Those numbers drop considerably when applied to the Fairfax County Police Department, where only 4.3 percent of officers are Asian and 4.1 percent Hispanic. White officers make up 84 percent of Fairfax County’s 1,360-member police department, significantly higher than the county’s general population (54 percent white). Almost 90% of the force lives outside the county.